Mathur Ritika Passi

esearch and activist organisations 2 in
the 1970s and onward propagated and
mainstreamed a conversation around
a ‘limit to development’-oriented
interpretation of SD. The Rio Declaration
of the 1992 Earth Summit crystallised the
sustainable development agenda for the first
time. The bundle of 27 principles included
within it propositions such as humans
as the referent objects of SD, the right to
development, environmental protection,
eradication of poverty, common but
differentiated responsibilities, curtailment
of unsustainable patterns of production and
consumption, an open international system,
environmental justice, warfare, women and
global partnerships.
Who is to Blame? Ghettoisation of
Sustainability among the Poor
The Brundtland Commission proposed a
“vicious downward spiral” between poverty
and environment degradation:
Many parts of the world are
caught in a vicious downward
spiral: poor people are forced
to overuse environmental resources
to survive from day to day, and
their impoverishment of the
environment further impoverishes
them, their survival even more
difficult and uncertain. 3
This effectively cast the poor as both
victims and but also the primary agents of
environmental degradation. The related
discourse on environmental ‘carrying
capacity’—the limit in the number of people
the Earth can sustain in the long term
without environmental damage—suggests
that the explosion in the population of the
poor further entrenches the ‘downward
spiral.’ 4 Ehrlich and Holdren’s popular
equation of I = PAT stated that population
impact (I) was a product of population size
(P), the affluence or per capita consumption
(A) and the technology supplying each level
unit of consumption (T). The increase in
the number of poor, i.e., the very visible
population explosions being experienced
by developing nations in the day, was thus
naturally linked to increasing pressure
on the ‘global’ environment. The Club de
Rome’s “Limits to Growth” report captured
this same negative view of population
growth.
These two dominant knowledge
paradigms, population growth and the
poverty-environment nexus, have shaped
political discourse. This has been despite
a concurrent focus among SD discussants
on the institutionalised pattern of
development leading to an unsustainable
pattern of resource utilisation, i.e.,
overconsumption. While environmental
stress has also been blamed on the high rate
of overconsumption and subsequent waste
creation—not only in the North, but also
by elite sections of developing countries—
instead of the population explosion in the
South, 5 the consumption-led economic
order, and the consequent equivalence of
development as economic growth, remains,
on the whole, the desired pathway for
progress among policymakers in developed
and developing nations alike. (Thus the
adverse reactions by both the North and
the South to the “Limits to Growth”
report.)
Such an end aim, 6 however, engenders
a double burden on developing nations.
Already industrialised nations have
achieved a certain level of development,
which enables them to attend to measures
that can aid in improving performance
through efficiency and thus reverse
environmental damage. 7 Sweden, therefore,
can plan to become the first fossil fuel-free
nation (with the increase in budget to be
largely financed by an increase in taxes on
petrol and diesel). 8 Developing countries,
on the other hand, do not have this luxury,
but are under the double burden of growing
and that too in a green manner.
Development space of fledgling or
incompletely industrialised economies could
even be constricted if they are to follow a
trajectory that makes them accountable to
at times competing imperatives of poverty
alleviation and human development, on the
one hand, and reducing environmental stress
on the other. For example, growth is needed
in sectors that lift millions out of poverty
but generate adverse environmental impacts,
such as transportation and power. 9
This binary burden for developing nations
is singularly visible in the SDG agenda. The
SDG agenda is built on three basic pillars
of sustainability—economic, social and
environmental. While the goals essentially
form a bucket list for middle- and lower-
7